Before you roll out any digital initiative, do keep in mind that everything an organization does must ultimately address an existing customerneed, challenge or frustration.

Focus on what your customers prefer, and how you can improve their experience.

Your digital success will predominantly be dependent on this single factor.

This can be as much an art as it is a science and it will serve as the key to maximizing your digital Return on Investment (ROI).

Accelerate & Fail Fast, Learn Fast and Succeed Faster

Although digital investments can increase your profitability quickly, as cited by more than 55 percent of CEOs polled by Gartner,² you may not be as successful as others in the first few attempts.

It is imperative that you treat your digital investments like you do any other, like a series of experiments.

You can almost never completely de-risk digital projects.

Any failures encountered can serve as learnings for subsequent initiatives. Instead of spending extended periods of time perfecting a solution, use agile methodologies to prototype solutions quickly and then refine them over time.

Cultivate a Digital Culture

They say: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” A recent report³ by Altimeter lists company culture as one of the top challenges faced by organizations embracing digital transformation.

Digital initiatives are usually owned by specific departments, resulting in competing priorities when enforced on other teams that do not have a ‘digital first’ mindset.

In order to overcome this, establish a core team that liaises effectively with all departments to roll out digital programs. Your entire workforce must be sensitized and trained on all aspects of a digital enterprise, including customer centricity, agility, innovation and aligned goals.

A workforce with a culture that is open to change and innovation will naturally increase your chances of ‘first time right’ in the context of digital transformation.

What cannot be measured cannot be managed or improved. This, of course, applies to digital investments and the associated ROI as well. You must maintain an enterprise-wide perspective on digital investments, and constantly monitor their impact on business. Each digital experiment must be tracked using a specific, pre-determined set of metrics, including both quantitative and qualitative parameters.

Do deploy an analytics engine to model the change in probability caused by the digital action.

This will play a crucial role in improving the probability of your digital programs’ success even before you invest in them.

Build a Partnership Model that Works for You

As you focus on overhauling your business model to become more digitally driven, partnering with the right technology and solution providers will become critical.

However, you would also want your existing operations and technology landscape to be able to support any such partnerships.

To optimize this experience, look for platforms that naturally support integrations with most of your business systems or those that extend or create customized integrations.

Also, determine whether to build or buy and select suitable partner models for implementations using metrics like the total cost of ownership and cost of change.